I have to admit that, without wanting to defend absurd wages for anyone, there’s a pretty decent explanation in the case of athletes. If you’re one of the top ten boxers in the world, there are tens (hundreds?) of millions of people that want to see your matches. It’s not unreasonable to ask for some compensation for providing entertainment, so let’s say each viewer is paying 1 USD / match. After paying the costs of setting up the match, you’re still left with millions of dollars per match.
Specially in the case of top-level athletes, we’re in a situation where very may people want to see very few people provide entertainment. Even if they take a very low price, they’re still going to be making buckets of money. I don’t really think that would be unfair, provided they actually charged some small amount. What irritates me is that the sports associations have decided to charge absurd amounts to squeeze people fore mine to make even more. That should definitely be illegal.
What irritates me is that the sports associations have decided to charge absurd amounts to squeeze people fore mine to make even more. That should definitely be illegal.
I split out my reply to this part because it’s obvious it will be downvoted heavily in Lemmy
I get the sentiment but how does that effectively work?
Running the economics framing: Prices act to lower consumers willing to pay so if there is a limited resource, like a ticket, then its a way to filter out until you have how much it’s worth.
That’s mostly influenced by how keen fans are, how many fans there are, and how rich they are.
You can use a lottery alone or in conjunction but that usually leads to a black market with expensive tickets too. It seems pretty reasonable to me to have a lottery for some of the tickets to be in a lottery, but it also seems to not work that well practically.
It seems like for a lot of things time is used as a commodity for at least some tickets, like waiting in line overnight or first to load the page. Both don’t really stop rich people, and have their other issues like realistically rewarding luck for if you hit refresh at the right moment without the server dying.
And it seems like some tickets go out to fan groups or individuals that have proven the care about the event like some trivia questions.
Looking at that, I’m just not intelligent enough to know how you really avoid at least a decent number of the tickets being expensive for some of the popular events.
I think this has gotten worse over time and I wonder how much of that is because we can move so much more freely than before. Or if there is another mechanism. Or if I’m just flat wrong here
Either way, I’m not sure how you make that substantially better
With modern tv/streaming, tickets aren’t a limited resource anymore, in the sense that by far most of the viewers are not in place live.
Sure, you could price live tickets following “normal” market rules, since you still have the practical limitation regarding the number of people living in reasonable distance from the stadium. The idea of using pricing to regulate demand/consumption for streaming services doesn’t really make sense the same way, since the marginal cost of another viewer is essentially zero.
Yeah, great point and a big oversight of mine when I replied. Since I periodically have a single soccer game I want to watch and only really expensive options I should know better. And I’m think one of the things stopping prices dropping there is agreement that basically remove competitors.
Yeah, some of the mechanisms the push the wage higher are pretty reasonable in isolation. I personally would love to see higher taxes on people earning these huge amounts (so CEOs etc) but I think it’s really unlikely to happen or be effective until we have stronger global treaties and I also don’t understand how you really do it with incomes that can be exponential (giving the benefit of the doubt: users / fans) since that somewhat neutralises that starts hitting brackets with a lot of nines.
I have to admit that, without wanting to defend absurd wages for anyone, there’s a pretty decent explanation in the case of athletes. If you’re one of the top ten boxers in the world, there are tens (hundreds?) of millions of people that want to see your matches. It’s not unreasonable to ask for some compensation for providing entertainment, so let’s say each viewer is paying 1 USD / match. After paying the costs of setting up the match, you’re still left with millions of dollars per match.
Specially in the case of top-level athletes, we’re in a situation where very may people want to see very few people provide entertainment. Even if they take a very low price, they’re still going to be making buckets of money. I don’t really think that would be unfair, provided they actually charged some small amount. What irritates me is that the sports associations have decided to charge absurd amounts to squeeze people fore mine to make even more. That should definitely be illegal.
I split out my reply to this part because it’s obvious it will be downvoted heavily in Lemmy
I get the sentiment but how does that effectively work?
Running the economics framing: Prices act to lower consumers willing to pay so if there is a limited resource, like a ticket, then its a way to filter out until you have how much it’s worth.
That’s mostly influenced by how keen fans are, how many fans there are, and how rich they are.
You can use a lottery alone or in conjunction but that usually leads to a black market with expensive tickets too. It seems pretty reasonable to me to have a lottery for some of the tickets to be in a lottery, but it also seems to not work that well practically.
It seems like for a lot of things time is used as a commodity for at least some tickets, like waiting in line overnight or first to load the page. Both don’t really stop rich people, and have their other issues like realistically rewarding luck for if you hit refresh at the right moment without the server dying.
And it seems like some tickets go out to fan groups or individuals that have proven the care about the event like some trivia questions.
Looking at that, I’m just not intelligent enough to know how you really avoid at least a decent number of the tickets being expensive for some of the popular events.
I think this has gotten worse over time and I wonder how much of that is because we can move so much more freely than before. Or if there is another mechanism. Or if I’m just flat wrong here
Either way, I’m not sure how you make that substantially better
With modern tv/streaming, tickets aren’t a limited resource anymore, in the sense that by far most of the viewers are not in place live.
Sure, you could price live tickets following “normal” market rules, since you still have the practical limitation regarding the number of people living in reasonable distance from the stadium. The idea of using pricing to regulate demand/consumption for streaming services doesn’t really make sense the same way, since the marginal cost of another viewer is essentially zero.
Yeah, great point and a big oversight of mine when I replied. Since I periodically have a single soccer game I want to watch and only really expensive options I should know better. And I’m think one of the things stopping prices dropping there is agreement that basically remove competitors.
Yeah, some of the mechanisms the push the wage higher are pretty reasonable in isolation. I personally would love to see higher taxes on people earning these huge amounts (so CEOs etc) but I think it’s really unlikely to happen or be effective until we have stronger global treaties and I also don’t understand how you really do it with incomes that can be exponential (giving the benefit of the doubt: users / fans) since that somewhat neutralises that starts hitting brackets with a lot of nines.